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Tuesday, 4 October 2011

The Scotsman is in no doubt what the big story is today – Megrahi’s death bed ‘confession’. It puts confession in quotes, but it’s a nod and a wink – we know what they really believe. The justification for this is in the sub header – Lockerbie bomber: ‘My name was exaggerated’. The Unionist logic on Megrahi – and the Scotsman is a unionist paper, whatever its pretensions to objectivity and its token inclusion of nationalist commentators – goes something like this -

The SNP Government, in their first term, made a damaging political error in releasing Megrahi, an error that had to be ruthlessly exploited by Scottish and Unionist UK politicians. The fundamental political error lay in releasing him on compassionate grounds, even if he was dying, since Unionist realpolitik would never have let compassion - or indeed the facts of Scottish Law on compassionate release - get in the way of political expediency.

But just in case the Scottish public - who have an unhappy tendency to be more humane and compassionate than the Labour and Tory hegemonies that have hitherto ruled them - shared the humanity of Kenny MacAskill and the SNP Government, the question had to be raised if Megrahi was really dying or not, and here they had the advantage that estimates of life expectancy in terminal illness often prove to be too short, and many terminally ill patients live for much longer than forecast. This bet was promptly hedged. If he died as forecast in three months, they could still argue bad judgement: if he lived longer, they could argue that it was a fix.

There were also a few other inconvenient factors for the Unionist parties to consider in the exploitation of a dying man for political purposes.

A significant number of Scots did not believe Megrahi was guilty, and some believed that he was involved but did not act alone. This was compounded by the fact that Doctor Jim Swire, who had lost his daughter in the Lockerbie atrocity - and was a prominent voice among the bereaved - did not believe that Megrahi was guilty.

Tony Blair had muddied the water by the abortive attempt to secure the deal in the desert with Gadaffi to release Megrahi for cynical political gain over oil, a deal that he had no power to make constitutionally, given the devolved settlement. This meant that a potential fault line lay between the Tories and LibDems on one side and UK Labour on the other. This was compounded by the fact that the American critics of the release believed that UK Labour had stitched up a deal with the SNP Government, a proposition that was utterly ludicrous to all who knew the total hostility of the Labour Party, at both UK and Scottish levels to the elected Government of the people of Scotland, and was more than a little inconvenient for Labour, less so for Cameron.

The most inconvenient factor of all was that Kenny MacAskill and the Scottish Government took the decision in the firm belief that Megrahi was guilty under the verdict reached at the trial. (This, for the record, is also my belief – I support the compassionate release decision although I believe Megrahi was guilty, although I do not believe that he acted alone.)

The pristine clarity of Kenny MacAskill’s decision rested on the fact that he believed Megrahi was guilty, had been properly found guilty as charged under Scots Law, but nevertheless was eligible for compassionate release. The Scottish Justice Minster, in the full knowledge that he would unleash a volley of critical fire, nonetheless did what was right, rather than what was expedient. No Scottish unionist politician had either the political or moral courage to take such a decision, and Scottish Labour were clearly kept out of the Machiavellian Blair/UK Labour loop and their machinations.

As the Gadaffi regime began its bloody collapse and Libya moved towards freedom from a brutal dictatorship, the unionist camp lived in hope of new disclosures that would confirm Megrahi’s guilt and somehow implicate the Scottish Government, still consumed by their faulty analysis of the dynamics of the situation.

They seized upon every panic-stricken defector who was prepared to say whatever was necessary to the US and UK governments to gain asylum and immunity from prosecution.

What emerged was in fact embarrassing revelations of just how close Blair, the Labour Government and now the Coalition had been to Gadaffi till the eleventh hour, when Cameron grasped his Maggie moment and found his war by joining France in supporting the rebels.

And so to yesterday at Megrahi’s sick bed and today at The Scotsman and elsewhere

What conclusions may we draw from Megrahi’s statement, and what does it signal for the future? The possibilities are easy to set out -

Megrahi is either feigning illness – the unstated sub-text of much unionist media comment – or he is dying. If the first is true, why would a man feted by the regime as a hero not be with Gadaffi in his final bunker in Sirte, instead a lying in a bed without any protection other than unarmed immediate family? To secure asylum to the West or the US by trading information? Such an explanation has zero credibility. He is pretty clearly seriously ill, has been abandoned by the regime, and does not have the drugs or medical care to alleviate his pain or prolong his life.

What would a guilty man do in such circumstances? He would admit his guilt, as other senior figures have done, and try to trade information for immunity.

What would an innocent man do in such circumstances? He would try and clear his name.

Since I believe Megrahi is guilty at least of complicity in the Lockerbie bombing, my conclusion is that he is terminally ill, has been abandoned by the regime, expects to die, expects nothing of the West, but wants to make the exact nature of his role in the atrocity clear before he dies.

Can we conclude anything from his statement, accurately reported in The Scotsman’s sub-header – “My name was exaggerated”. If this strange formulation is accurate, nothing can be concluded from it – it could mean anything. But The Scotsman, the unionist media and the bandwagon jumpers such as Johann Lamont have rapidly translated Megrahi’s gnomic statement into – “My role was exaggerated”.

Megrahi could have meant that – he equally could have meant that his name and identity, as an acknowledged senior member of the Libyan security apparatus, were seized upon by the media, even though he had no direct involvement in the plot.

But none of the this changes the analysis vis a vis Kenny MacAskill’s release decision. The situation is now as it has always been, crystal clear.

1. If conclusive evidence is found of Megrahi’s guilt, even if it confirmed him as the sole architect of the Lockerbie bombing atrocity, that would simply confirm the belief in which the Scottish Justice Minister made his decision, namely that Megrahi was guilty as charged.

2. If conclusive evidence is found that Megrahi was completely innocent of the charge, or complicit and not the prime mover, or that he was guilty but did not act alone, then the world must recognise that a compassionate decision, made in the belief that he was guilty, in fact had averted a grave miscarriage of justice.

3. If conclusive evidence was found that, in the face of all rationality and all that we know, that the Labour Government and the British intelligence services somehow conspired with Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill to find a spurious rational for releasing Megrahi, then the American Republican Right would be ecstatic, Labour's already deeply damaged reputation would be dealt a terminal blow, and the UK would be seriously damaged because of the continuity of exactly the same people in the shadowy world of intelligence across both the Brown and Cameron/Clegg regimes, a conspiracy to defeat the legitimate wishes of the American people and the families of the American victims to see justice done to the murder of their loved ones.

But we have conclusive evidence – evidence of Blair’s Deal (a non-deal) in the Desert, of the Brown Government’s complicity and of the Cameron/Clegg Coalition’s close, intimate relations with a brutal, probably insane dictator up to the eleventh hour, while human rights were being brutally violated with the UK’s full knowledge in Gadaffi’s torture chambers and dungeons, all in the name of realpolitik and oil.

The Megrahi Affair teaches us a lot about the Scottish Government and its Justice Minister - who acted unselfishly and upheld the highest principle of law, justice and human compassion - and successive UK Governments and the three Unionist parties that comprised them at various times – who acted in the most despicable traditions of a brutal, expedient and values-free colonial imperialism.

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

An article today by John McTernan in The Scotsman epitomises what the Scottish Labour Party is all about. I quote -

Playing the nasty card might get results

by John McTernan (The Scotsman 27April 2011)

“Everyone who aspire to political office has to be, at least in part, an intellectual thug.”

“How do you become First Minister of Scotland? Simple. Malcolm X was right. “By any means necessary.” If you’re not prepared to follow his advice, you should avoid politics as a career.”

I spent some time earlier today in an exchange with John McTernan on Twitter about what the thing that now calls itself the Labour party now stands for. At that point, I hadn’t read the article, but I have now. It is the politics of the gutter, the worst kind of right-wing Tory ‘Laura Norder’ populism, appealing to fear, ignoring statistics and the views of the professionals who actually have to maintain law and order. We have heard it recently from Goldie, Gray and Kerr in all its intellectual poverty and innumeracy.

It is the politics of desperation, employed by every right-wing party when they see power slipping away to real democracy and the power of argument and the spirit of a people as their national consciousness awakens after a long somnolence - a fevered nightmare. And the thing that is now the Labour Party machine is a right-wing party, by any definition.

It is interesting that John McTernan chooses to quote Malcolm X, rather than John Paul Sartre, the author of the phrase. Malcolm X was a convicted criminal at age 21, some years before before he embarked on a career of violence with the Nation of Islam, a violent extremist organisation: a man who advocated openly the use of violence and weapons to achieve his ends, and who despised the way of democracy and peace, the way of Martin Luther King. Malcolm X came to see the error of at least some of his political philosophy, broke with the nation of Islam, and was then murdered by those he had antagonised.

I think I can say with some certainty that John McTernan’s answer to his own question “How do you become First Minister of Scotland?” - “By any means necessary” is not the answer that would have been given by Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish or Jack McConnell, nor would they have regarded themselves “at least in part as an intellectual thug”. It is certainly not the answer that would be given by the present First Minister, Alex Salmond, nor has it ever been a political approach that he has ever employed.

It is, quite simply, a contemptible philosophy, one that I would say the Labour Party should be ashamed of, but for the fact that they are now incapable of shame or remorse, as the tragedy of Iraq continues to show (McTernan defended Blair’s folly today on Twitter), and their inability to acknowledge their fundamental role in causing the UK’s present economic nightmare.

Today’s lead story in The Times gladdens the heart, but then I remind myself that a poll is just a poll, and however psephologically sophisticated the selection of the 1000 voters polled, these indicators shift and waver in the lead-up to an election. But the shift is marked, and highly welcome, and I entertain the hope that it is an indicator that my fellow Scots have seen through the web of media lies, distortion, selective reporting that represents so much of UK - and shamefully, Scottish - media coverage of Scottish affairs and our devolved politics.

Ipsos MORI poll

forecast Holyrood seat on May 5th

SNP 51 seats (up 4) Labour 48 seats (up 2)

Tories 14seats (down 3) LibDem 12 seats (down 4)

Green 4 seats (up 2)

I can only recommend that you buy today’s Times and luxuriate in the good news while it lasts, and fervently hope that it will last, and that the momentum will grow until May 5th.

But don’t relax - get the message out, by every means possible, that Scotland intends to be governed by its ain folk, because only its ain folk can govern it well.